11+ pass mark, qualifying score and cut-off

There is no 11+ pass mark in the way a driving test has one. Three separate numbers get called the pass mark. They are set by different people at different moments, and only one of them exists before your child walks into the exam hall.

Those three are the qualifying score, the cut-off and the lowest score actually admitted. A family that reads one as another usually makes one of two mistakes: relaxing because a child cleared a bar that was never the bar that mattered, or panicking at a number that described a different school in a different year. This guide separates them, using figures schools and councils publish about themselves.

What is a qualifying score?

A qualifying score is set by a county, a consortium or a school before any offer is made, and it decides one thing only: whether a child is judged suitable for a grammar school place. It says nothing about whether one is available.

Kent publishes its standard on the council’s own results page. Read it exactly, because it has two clauses rather than one. For the 2025 test, a grammar school assessment needed a total score of 332 or more, with no single score lower than 108, on papers standardised from 69 to 141 . The second clause does real work: a child can pass the total and still be assessed as suited to a high school because one paper came in low. That is one of the reasons a bare total is a poor way to think about the test, and it is covered in more detail in the Kent Test, section by section.

Other areas write their gate differently, on scales that have nothing to do with Kent’s. Aylesbury Grammar School’s determined policy says boys are eligible to be considered if they meet the required qualifying score of 121 in the Buckinghamshire Secondary Transfer Test, a total built from three age-standardised scores, or have been deemed qualified by a Selection Review . In Essex the consortium sets a floor instead: offers are not made to any child who has scored under a total standardised score of 303 .

Three numbers, three scales, three meanings. Reading one against another tells you nothing at all about which area is harder, which is the first thing a forum thread will try to do with them. If the scale itself is unfamiliar, how standardised age scores work is the piece to read first.

What is a cut-off score?

A cut-off is a different animal. It is not set in advance by anyone: it is the score the last place happened to go at, once the school had ranked everyone who qualified, applied its criteria and run out of places. It is a fact about one year’s applicants rather than a standard the school chose.

The Judd School publishes its own, which is unusually open, and the way it publishes them shows why the distinction matters. For 2026 entry the school gives cut-off scores of 389 for the inner area and 403 for the outer area, with the mean total of those actually offered places sitting higher again at 396.5 and 409.2 . The year before, the same page gives 371 and 398 . On The Judd School you can see the area definitions those figures depend on.

The same school moved its inner-area boundary by eighteen points in a single year, without changing anything about how it admits . A cut-off is made by the applicants, not by the school, so it moves with them. And the school prints its own caveat next to the numbers: not all students on those scores were offered a place . A cut-off is the boundary of a queue, and a queue can be tied at the boundary.

What did the children who got in actually score?

Where a school releases its data pupil by pupil, a different figure becomes visible, and it is the one parents actually want: what did the children who got in score.

Dartford Grammar School answered a Freedom of Information request in March 2025 with one row per admitted pupil, giving the age-standardised Kent Test total and the admission category for three entry years . Across those years the lowest score that actually secured a place was 358 for 2024 entry and 354 for both 2023 and 2022, against a county qualifying standard of 332 . The median admitted total ran between 394 and 406 .

That is the gap the whole article is about. Kent’s standard and Dartford’s intake are both real, both published, and roughly seventy points apart at the middle . A parent told only the first number has been told something true and something useless.

Who publishes it	The figure	What it actually is
Kent County Council	332 total, no single score below 108 (2025 test)	Qualifying standard: who is assessed as suited to a grammar school
Consortium of Selective Schools in Essex	303 total	Floor: no CSSE offer is made below it, anywhere
The Judd School	389 inner area, 403 outer area (2026 entry)	Cut-off: where the queue stopped, with ties possible on the line
Dartford Grammar School	358 (2024 entry)	Lowest score actually admitted, from one row per pupil
Dartford Grammar School for Girls	371 in area, 395 out of area (2024 entry)	Cut-off by category, with no average published

A mean, a median and a cut-off can never share a column, which is why the table above names the kind of figure in every row. Our school pages carry the same discipline: the label is printed with the number, always, because a cut-off quietly relabelled as an average is the error we see most often when a parent brings us a number they found somewhere.

Do some schools set a bar above the county’s?

There is a fourth thing a school can publish, and it catches people out because it looks like a cut-off and behaves like a qualifying score.

Dartford Grammar School’s determined arrangements for 2027 entry reserve 130 of the 180 places for a priority area, and inside that category a boy needs a total of at least 40 points higher than the Kent Test threshold score, with the Pupil Premium routes set at 20 points above it . That is a standard the school has chosen in advance, expressed relative to a county number that will not be known until October. It is published, it is binding, and it is not a cut-off.

On Dartford Grammar School you can read that arrangement next to the admitted-score record it produces.

A boy sitting the Kent Test scores 122 in English, 128 in maths and 125 in reasoning, giving a total of 375. What does that total tell his family about a place at Dartford Grammar School for 2027 entry?

The usual wrong route

The usual reading is that 375 clears 332 comfortably, so the place is close to safe. That mistakes the county door for the school’s queue, and it also skips the school’s own priority-area condition entirely.

The method

1. County standard: 375 is above 332, and no single paper is below 108, so both clauses of the Kent standard are met. He is grammar assessed.
2. The school’s own priority-area condition: at least 40 points above the Kent Test threshold score. If the threshold sits where it did for the 2025 test, that is 372, so 375 clears it by 3 points and no more.
3. The intake floor: the lowest total actually admitted was 358, 354 and 354 across 2024, 2023 and 2022 entry, so 375 is above the floor of every one of those three years.
4. The middle of the intake: the median admitted total ran 394 to 406. He is roughly twenty to thirty points below the typical boy who got in.

So the answer is not yes or no. It is that he qualifies, he squeaks past the school’s own condition on last year’s threshold, and he is well inside the range where the queue decides rather than the bar.

Answer: He is grammar assessed; he clears the school’s own priority-area condition by 3 points if the threshold repeats; he is above the lowest total admitted in each of the last three years, and 20 to 30 points below the median boy admitted.In the paper: Two minutes with the school’s policy open.

What does it mean when a school publishes nothing?

Most schools publish none of this, and their silence is easy to misread.

Some rank by distance rather than by score, so there is no cut-off score to publish: once a child qualifies, the address does the work. Some are not full in a given year, which makes the idea of a cut-off meaningless. Some simply choose not to, and release figures only when somebody asks under the Freedom of Information Act, which is where the Dartford figures above come from .

Dartford Grammar School for Girls is a useful example of the middle case. Its response gives in-area and out-of-area cut-off scores for three years, ending at 371 in area and 395 out of area for 2024 entry, and no average of any kind . So the boundary is known and the shape of the intake is not, and nobody should invent the missing half. Where our records hold a cut-off and no average, the school page says so rather than estimating.

The rule to carry away is this: an absence of data is not evidence of absence. A school that publishes no cut-off is not a school with no bar. It is a school that has not told you where its bar sat.

Why is the number you find online always last year’s?

Every figure in this article describes a test that has already happened, and that is not a flaw in the sources, it is the nature of the thing. Kent says plainly that the threshold for the next cycle will be published in October, alongside results . The Essex consortium is blunter still: its guidance sheet is historical, and the actual cut-off scores are only known after national offer day in March .

Between the test and offer day you will be handed a score and you will want to compare it with something. The only defensible comparisons are the published qualifying standard for that year, and several years of a school’s own figures read as a range rather than a line. Everything else is a forum guess wearing a number. If your child’s result is close to a boundary, what happens on results day and afterwards matters more than any target score, and the odds on an appeal are published school by school on our grammar school appeals page.

What should you do next for your child?

Practically, three things follow.

Find the qualifying standard for your area and treat it as the entry condition, not the goal. It is the one number set in advance and applying to everybody, and usually the easiest of the three to find.

Then find your school’s own published history, if it has one, and read it as a range. Several years of cut-offs tell you where the bar has sat and how far it moves; a single year tells you almost nothing. A condition the school sets itself, like Dartford’s priority-area rule, is firmer than any cut-off, because the school chose it rather than the applicants setting it.

Then stop optimising for the number. Nothing you do at home moves a cut-off, and everything you do at home moves the raw marks that go into the total. To see how a raw mark becomes the number a school sees, our standardised score calculator shows the arithmetic and the band around it, free and with no sign-up. To see how wide the gap between qualifying and being offered a place can be, read the children who reached Kent’s standard and were still assessed high.

Common questions

What is the pass mark for the 11+?

There is no national one. Some areas publish a qualifying standard, which is the score at which a child is judged suitable for a grammar school. Some schools publish a cut-off, which is the score the last place went at in a past year. The two are different numbers doing different jobs, and neither is a pass mark in the way a driving test has one.

Is the qualifying score the same as the cut-off?

No. A qualifying score is the door: it makes a child eligible to be considered. A cut-off is where a queue happened to stop in a particular year, after the school had applied its own admissions criteria. In an oversubscribed area the cut-off usually sits well above the qualifying score.

My child qualified. Does that mean they have a place?

No. Qualifying means the application will be considered rather than refused on academic grounds. The school’s oversubscription criteria then decide who is offered a place, and at a full school many qualified children are not offered one.

Why does one school publish a cut-off and another publish nothing?

Because publishing is a choice, not a duty. Some schools put last year’s figures on their own admissions pages, some release them only in response to a Freedom of Information request, and many rank by distance rather than by score, so they have no cut-off score to publish at all. Where a school publishes nothing, that is an absence of data, not evidence that there is no bar.

Can I use last year’s cut-off as a target?

Only as a rough guide. A cut-off is set by that year’s applicants, not by the school, so it moves with the cohort. Treat several years of published figures as the shape of the bar and never as a promise about the next one.